While the National Government refrained from withholding the elective franchise from men who had fought to destroy the Union, there is no doubt that disabilities and exclusions were imposed upon large classes in certain States of the South.
Blaine notes the imposition of disabilities on certain Southern populations despite the government's stance on suffrage.
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In turn, the course of the National Administration would certainly be influenced, and its fate in large degree determined, by the conduct of the Southern men, in whom the President was placing unbounded trust.
Their convention did more to popularize the Fourteenth Amendment as a political issue than any other instrumentality of the year.
The wisdom of maintaining that institution was abundantly vindicated by the results of the war.
As slavery had been the chief inciting cause of disunion, slavery should die.
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